


Come Back Soon to Charming

by bethfury



Category: Sons of Anarchy
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 14:06:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethfury/pseuds/bethfury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tara questions if she’ll ever finally leave and Jax already has the countdown to the day imprinted on his eyelids, glaring numbers flashing whenever they kiss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Back Soon to Charming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theepiccek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theepiccek/gifts).



1\. _Chest Compression_  
  
Tara didn't fall in love with Jax. Even if she could feel her pulse speed up and her cheeks redden when he spoke.  
  
She didn’t tumble, laughing and happy, into love with him. Tara didn’t have girlfriends to gossip with about the cute boy in the low slung jeans and hoodie.  
  
She didn’t even tiny scribble ‘do you like me yes/no’ on a piece of composition paper in love with him. There was no prom or homecoming or triumphant moment with a beautiful dress and the bad boy in a tux.  
  
The lanky blonde boy sat down at her lab table in biology and gave her a confident smirk before slouching back in his chair. Mr. Francis told her to look after him and not let him get distracted, but he never told her to not study the shape of his profile or the little piece of black ink that escaped from beneath the sleeve of his sweatshirt.  
  
She dissected a frog and grazed hands into love with him.  
  
Jax didn’t stare when she grabbed the scalpel while the other girls wrinkled their noses and tried to convince their lab partner to take over.  
  
He didn’t mock her wide eyes or the way her bangs fell into them as she leaned closer. The smile on his face didn’t fade and everything in the room felt hot to her.  
  
Jax laughed at her joke about the frog’s liver and Tara decided to let him walk her to English class.  
  
But he smiled at her again and suddenly she was on the back of his motorcycle, clutching his sides and burying her face in the crook of his neck to hide from the wind.  
  
Nobody warned Tara about a fair-haired boy who wanted to hear her talk about the first planet they found in another galaxy or about ebola and how it would decimate a village. Or about how he would always catch her eye as he strode into class and would hold her hand under the lab table, his father’s rings heavy and cold against her fingers.  
  
Her father didn’t notice when she missed curfew or whether she left for school or who the young man was revving his bike outside his home each afternoon. Her mother watched her leave from an urn on the mantle and photo hung above the television.  
  
“My mother warned me about girls like you,” Jax chuckled one night as Tara fumbled with his belt buckle.  
  
Tara paused and smiled as it finally came off, “What did she say?”  
  
“Jackson, watch out for the fiery Irish girls, they’ll break your heart,” he answered, undoing the last button on her shirt.  
  
She leaned in to kiss his neck and whispered, “You better hope she’s not right.”  
  
2\. _Airway_  
  
Her lip gloss is cherry red and stolen from the vanity in Gemma’s bathroom. Tara can feel it sticky and saccharine as Jax’s mouth crashes into hers, the sheets from her bed caught around her bare legs.  
  
She decided to leave the week before when the tattoo artist declared her done and the crow was fresh against back. Opie told her it was “hot” and Jax’s grip around her waist seemed to tighten as they walked into the lobby of the shop.  
  
Tara could feel a vision of the future slam into her of a boundaryless husband who saw prison more than he saw his kids. Her face worn and wrinkled looking at him through a glass window, tending to injured members and never asking questions. Purposeless and formless except how the club needed her or how her man needed her.  
  
Unless he died.  
  
But she wondered then, would there be a body?  
  
Would there be a call from Highway Patrol or just an absence of his presence one day? A funeral full of bikers and an anchor holding her to the town and these people.  
  
Tara saw herself as Gemma and begged her father to get her out. She cried and pleaded and Mr. Francis made a call to admissions to give her a place to go. No one asked her why, everyone gave her what they could.  
  
But the words were lost for him as she lay warm against his chest, strong arms holding her and Jax’s same smile looking down on her.  
  
He kissed her head and Tara imagined a life where he lived and left. Where they both went to school and Jax forgot about Charming. Bright little rowdy flaxen-haired boys like their Papa, proud and smart like their Mama. His hands dirty with grease, her hands delicate in surgery, and neither one of them remember the old language of clubs and gangs and what gun would cause the most damage.  
  
Tara knew how easy it was to hate herself. She knew how easy it would be to hate him too.  
  
She waits to tell him when her car is packed and school is waiting for her in a few days.  
  
He doesn’t pretend that he’ll stop her.  
  
She doesn’t pretend to want him to come.  
  
But the Charming sign tells her to ‘Come Home Soon!’ and his headlight in her rearview mirror as she pulls onto the interstate is a pledge.  
  
3\. _Breathing_  
  
Tara never falls out of love with him.  
  
She doesn’t remove her tattoo or drunkenly announce that Jax Teller is dead to her. There is no moment of clarity where she realizes she doesn’t need him and the cherry lip gloss still sits in her makeup bag.  
  
She likes to think she imagined a life where Charming doesn’t exist and her hand isn’t empty without the sensation of his solid rings against her fingers.  
  
But he comes back to her like an amnesiac having flashes of a past life.  
  
A young thug, clutching a wound on his side, swearing at her from a gurney, begging her not to call his mom. Tara did call her and she could hear her break over the phone.  
  
“How do you stop someone so focused on being a man?” she cried to Tara who waited until she was hiding in a supply closet to crumble.  
  
A group of bikers fly past her on a drive to Northwestern for a conference, their cuts proudly announcing themselves as Vietnam Vets. She sped to follow them until they pulled off at a campsite and she remembered how his jacket felt against her hands.  
  
When Joshua hit her, she remembered the taste of pennies in her mouth when the tiny fist of a girl interested in Jax had connected with her chin. Tara had hit her back brutally until Opie had carried her from the room, kicking and frothing at the girl who never came back to the clubhouse again.  
  
Jax had wrapped her knuckles and wiped away the blood pooling on her lip. He had kissed her hand and reminded her, “You need these to be perfect if you are going to be a surgeon one day.”  
  
“Jax, it isn’t going to happen,” she had responded, feeling her breaths coming more rapidly, “We don’t have to pretend.”  
  
“Tara Grace Knowles, I know one thing,” he proudly announced, running a hand over her hair, “That you will one day be Doctor Tara Grace Knowles-Teller and I will be the proudest husband in the world.”  
  
Jax comes back to her in songs on the radio and summer afternoons where the sun is high and hot against her shoulders. He filters in through hazy memories of pale scars across his hip and his laughter when she tells him the frog’s liver probably looks better than her dad’s.  
  
On a snowy street in Chicago, Tara breathes and knows that in a tiny town in California, Jax is breathing with her.  
  
She books her plane ticket the next night.


End file.
